1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming apparatus such as a copying machine, a printer device, and a facsimile, a tray ID allocating method of the image forming apparatus, a computer program product including a computer-readable recording medium on which a program that is executed by a computer (CPU) controlling the image forming apparatus is recorded, and the computer-readable recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Manufacturers of image forming apparatuses set different tray IDs for identifying sheet feed trays.
Some image forming apparatuses have a function of designating plural tray IDs to one sheet feed tray so that the same sheet feed tray can be identified by different tray IDs. Even in such image forming apparatuses, when the user does not designate a tray ID for a sheet feed tray, a default tray ID is used as the tray ID for identifying the sheet feed tray.
On the other hand, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-281111 discloses a technique relating to a protocol analyzer that can perform an analysis based on an original protocol and an extended protocol by registering the original protocol and the extended protocol.
In the conventional image forming apparatuses, however, when the user designates a tray ID to one sheet feed tray and the tray ID happens to match with a default tray ID (i.e., initial tray ID) of other sheet feed tray, this tray becomes unusable.
Though the technique described in Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-281111 appears to be applicable for eliminating such an inconvenience, the technique is device-dependent and cannot be applied to the image forming apparatus suffering from such inconvenience.